There’s been a relatively recent swelling of $100M ARR commercial open-source businesses (Confluent, Elastic, Mongo, GitLab). The common strategy seems to be an “open core” with $$$ enterprise-level addons. Are there any examples on that scale with consumers as customers?
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That seems to be right! But it's unfortunate that none of these actually have an open core.
Related: I wonder why there isn't more "source available"-licensed commercial software.
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Ah, I see. Open source businesses for enterprises are often open core because they wouldn't be adopted otherwise - enterprises were too burned by Oracle to build their infrastructure on top of something that they don't have control over.
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There are a growing number of projects that use source available licenses: cockroachlabs.com/blog/oss-relic, sentry.io/_/open-source/, mariadb.com/bsl-faq-adopti, mongodb.com/community/lice, though I think the jury is still out on where this is most effective.
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Source available can be the same as freemium, but it’s still dependent on the license. Our use of BSL is very much freemium, but it doesn’t have to be that way. Open core could arguably be thought of as the same, but usually those businesses approach it differently.
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